Tuesday Poem: Facial impressions

On the map it’s a runny nose
dripping Florida’s Keys
into the Gulf of Mexico.

But when the Beach Boys sing Kokomo
I still join in – Key Largo, Montego…
Come on pretty mama
That’s where you wanna go…

Although you can’t say Everglades to me
without large birds flapping their gantry wings
as they fly away from the evil
that slithers into the swamp
near those ghoul-like cypress trees
dreadlocked in Spanish moss.

And you can’t say Lake Okeechobee
without me seeing the mass murderer
who is really innocent
running through the lake-edge water
looking over his shoulder and tripping
when he hears the sound
of the blood hounds
that he can’t see through the mist
that parts then shrouds
the spectral trees.

And if you say Miami to me
I say vice, Don Johnson
the film whose names I can’t remember
with the Florida chapter of the mafia
that the Chicago Godfather
wants to rub out/pencil in
for an unstable alliance
between the New York bosses
and the Cuban connection
that morphs to the Pelican Brief
that changes into Scarface
starring Al Pacino.

I say it’s the front tooth of a mouth
which is really a womb
annually spawning several children
each with chainsaw limbs
only one eye
and a murderer’s heart.


This poem appeared in Tongues of Ash.  Visit Tuesday Poem for more poems this week.

Tuesday Poem: Evensong in a graveyard of villas

The pines on the ridge are about to cede

their colour to the night.  Once more

light’s absence will shroud this place.

Not even car-lights on the highway below

(such is their need for road when it’s dark)

re-mark the trees – their placement

their particular explanation of green.

Soon the evening will lay claim too

to vestiges of villas which once stood

in the bush beneath the pines –

orphaned lawns, homeless paths

rhododendron that flower

among five-finger, tree fern, rata.

These last artefacts mark the bones

of grand abodes. These and a plaque

at the site of each home

listing its name, its history of dwellers

its date of sacrifice to the road.


This poem, which appears in Tongues of Ash, came to me one day as I was staring out of my office, looking for inspiration. My view is over a State Highway onto a hillside, part of a reserve of native bush called Percy's Reserve and I remembered on one of my rambles there seeing the preserved sites of what once were houses.

The tone of the poem was a far from perfect attempt to capture what Bryan Walpert, one of Tuesday Poem's alumni once spectacularly achieved, in a poem called Aubade, which won the NZPS 2007 poetry competition. Evensong in a graveyard of villas was not based on Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, as one reviewer of Tongues of Ash once asserted.

 Visit Tuesday Poem for more poems this week.
 

A drizzle of ghazals

'Water' was the theme of the latest Challenge issued by the online Ghazal Page journal. The ghazals for the Water Challenge were selected by guest editor and Kapiti Coast-based, New Zealand poet Mary Cresswell. Among the 12 ghazals by American, Canadian, and New Zealand writers are two I wrote which were originally published in Tongues of Ash – Winds and Time and All in a Day's Work.